80 Essences and shadows
The ideas behind this philosophy are, in many ways, quite straightforward, but they are challenging because they go against ways of thinking that have been prevalent since the Enlightenment [1][2][3][4][5][6]. They argue that all entities — big or small, biological or social, real or imagined — have a fundamental ‘core’ or ‘essence’. This essence defines what the thing is, but it always exceeds our ability to ‘know’ it fully. We can know what a cup is, for instance, but we can never exhaust its possible uses or meanings.
We are prevented from knowing the essence of something fully, in part because all things are ‘coated’ with layers of meanings and properties. These ‘surface’ properties, or adumbrations (meaning ‘shadows’), can be removed or exchanged for other meanings and properties without the thing losing its essential identity. So, we might recognise an apple by its shape, colour, and taste, but an apple does not need to be red and shiny to be an apple. Cars can be red and shiny too.
Recognising the adumbrations we layer on to entities is important because it can help us to understand how something like physiotherapy works. All too often we have struggled to know why it is that some therapies bring about profound change, and others fail. We have struggled because we have spent so many years adding layers of theories, concepts, data, practices, techniques, and approaches to the physical therapies, that we can no longer see the essence of the therapies themselves. We have done this for many of the reasons set out in the earlier chapters of this book, but the effect has been to increasingly obscure the therapies that we claim to have an intimate connection with. Deleuze and Guattari call this process territorialisation [7]. It is what we do when we impose a label or some particular meaning on a thing in order to control it. Deleuze and Guattari argued that we needed to focus, instead, on de-territorialising things; stripping away the added properties and layers of meaning, and in doing so brings us closer to the ’thing itself’ (the ‘noumena’).
- Barad KM. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press; 2007 ↵
- Bennett J. Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham (NC): Duke University Press; 2009 ↵
- Morton T. Humankind: Solidarity with nonhuman people. London, UK: Verso; 2017 ↵
- Harman G. Object-Oriented Ontology: A new theory of everything. London, UK: Pelican Books; 2018 ↵
- Latour B. Reassembling the social-an introduction to actor-network-theory. Reassembling the Social-An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, by Bruno Latour, pp 316 Foreword by Bruno Latour Oxford University Press, Sep 2005 ISBN-10: 0199256047 ISBN-13: 9780199256044. 2005;1 ↵
- Massumi B. Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press; 2002 ↵
- Deleuze G, Guattari F. A thousand plateaus — Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; 1987 ↵
